Recently I was tasked to come up with a current awareness tool that tracks the ongoing debate surrounding Net Neutrality. The challenge for this project was to create something that wouldn’t just capture all activity for the keywords, but to filter out everything except for articles with the most social activity. The tools I used for this were PostRank, Yahoo Pipes, and TwitterFeed. The resulting feed comes in two flavors:

1. RSS: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=4fb3b4ef2e272af1db49cb43c0a3d399&_render=rss
2. Twitter: http://twitter.com/PRNetNeutrality

Goal:

Provide a current awareness feed that aggregates posts from the web which are the most “interacted-with”, but without swamping subscribers.

The sources used were Delicious, Digg, CircleID, Save the Internet Blog, and Google News

Methodology:

1. Use PostRank to analyze the above feeds for engagement scoring. The raw results can be viewed under the PostRank topic net-neutrality
2. Use Yahoo Pipes to filter out postings that have PostRank scores below 6.0 while combining the results into a single feed. After monitoring these feeds for a while, a score of 6.0 or higher seemed to be producing the best results.
3. Convert that feed into a low-traffic twitter bot via TwitterFeed

The resulting format for each post is:

[PostRank score] [Post Title] [Post Date] [Post text & link]

Key findings:

1. The resulting feed is low traffic and highly relevant, but not what you might call “breaking news”. Most results are a day old at least. I don’t think this is a bug, but a feature. If a person were to build a series of these, the result would be highly relevant postings which push out only the most active items. This would be good for monitoring topics that are interesting, but not an obsession. In a way, this is an example of a tool that makes use of the principles of “social proof“.
2. The Google News source is a little disappointing because PostRank scores every article as “1.0″. I’m not quite sure why this is, but I’ve I’ve kept it in the source list in case things change.
3. C0mbining social aggregators like Digg or Delicious with a tool like PostRank works out quite nicely.